IEEE COG 2019 RECORDINGS

Industry day

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

IEEE CoG 2019 Proceedings

The CoG 2019 proceedings are available on IEEE Xplore. If you or your institution has access to IEEE Xplore, you can download papers from there where other useful information is also available, such as authors' details and their list of IEEE publications; otherwise please find the list of CoG 2019 papers below.

AI for Playing Games

Regular papers

• Comprehensible Context-driven Text Game Playing, Xusen Yin and Jonathan May
• Re-determinizing MCTS in Hanabi, James Goodman
• Enhancing Rolling Horizon Evolution with Policy and Value Networks, Xin Tong, Weiming Liu and Bin Li
• A Reinforcement Learning Approach To Synthesizing Climbing Movements, Kourosh Naderi, Amin Babadi, Shaghayegh Roohi and Perttu Hämäläinen
• Desirable Behaviors for Companion Bots in First-Person Shooters, Adina Friedman and Jacob Schrum
• Using Restart Heuristics to Improve Agent Performance in Angry Birds, Tommy Liu, Jochen Renz, Peng Zhang and Matthew Stephenson
• A Fighting Game AI Using Highlight Cues for Generation of Entertaining Gameplay, Ryota Ishii, Suguru Ito, Ruck Thawonmas and Tomohiro Harada
• Robust Continuous Build-Order Optimization in StarCraft, David Churchill, Michael Buro and Richard Kelly
• Deep Reinforcement Learning to train agents to survive in a multiplayer First Person Shooter: some preliminary results, Daniele Piergigli, Laura Anna Ripamonti, Dario Maggiorini and Davide Gadia
• Learning Policies from Self-Play with Policy Gradients and MCTS Value Estimates, Dennis Soemers, Eric Piette, Matthew Stephenson and Cameron Browne
• Ensemble Decision Systems for General Video Game Playing, Damien Anderson, Cristina Guerrero-Romero, Diego Perez-Liebana, Philip Rodgers and John Levine
• Solving Strong and Weak 4-in-a-Row, Jos Uiterwijk
• Beating Uncertainty in Racing Bot Evolution through Enhanced Exploration and Pole Position Selection, Salem Mohammed, Antonio Mora and Jj Merelo
• Policy Based Inference in Trick-Taking Card Games, Douglas Rebstock, Chris Solinas, Michael Buro and Nathan R. Sturtevant
• A Local Approach to Forward Model Learning: Results on the Game of Life Game, Alexander Dockhorn, Vanessa Volz, Simon M. Lucas, Chris Bamford, Ivan Bravi, Raluca D. Gaina, Diego Perez-Liebana, Sanaz Mostaghim and Rudolf Kruse
• Random Search-Control Parameters in Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Random Search-Control Parameters in Monte-Carlo Tree Search
• GBDT, LR & Deep Learning for Turn-based fighting game AI, Like Zhang, Hui Pan, Qi Fan, Changqing Ai and Yanqing Jing
• Ordinal Bucketing for Game Trees using Dynamic Quantile Approximation, Tobias Joppen, Tilman Strübig and Johannes Fürnkranz
• General Board Game Playing for Education and Research in Generic AI Game Learning, Wolfgang Konen
• Action Spaces in Deep Reinforcement Learning to Mimic Human Input Devices, Marco Pleines, Frank Zimmer and Vincent-Pierre Berges
• Combining “experience replay” with “exploration by random network distillation”, Francesco Sovrano
• Neuroevolution Strategies for Word Embedding Adaptation in Text Adventure Games, Vivan Raaj Rajalingam and Spyridon Samothrakis
• Evaluating the Complexity of Players Strategies using MCTS Iterations, Pier Luca Lanzi
• Application of Retrograde Analysis on Fighting Games, Kristen Yu and Nathan Sturtevant
• Learning Policies from Human Data for Skat, Douglas Rebstock, Christopher Solinas and Michael Buro
• Automated Playtesting of Matching Tile Games, Luvneesh Mugrai, Fernando De Mesentier Silva and Julian Togelius
• Teaching on a Budget in Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ercüment İlhan, Diego Perez-Liebana and Jeremy Gow
• Rogue-Gym: A New Challenge for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning, Yuji Kanagawa and Tomoyuki Kaneko

Competition papers

• Blood Bowl: A New Board Game Challenge and Competition for AI, Niels Justesen, Lasse Uth, Christopher Jakobsen, Peter Moore, Julian Togelius and Sebastian Risi
• The 2018 Hanabi Competition, Joseph Walton-Rivers, Piers Williams and Richard Bartle
• Enhancing Monte Carlo Tree Search for Playing Hearthstone, Jean Seong Bjorn Choe and Jong-Kook Kim
• Evolving Game State Evaluation Functions for a Hybrid Planning Approach, Xenija Neufeld, Sanaz Mostaghim and Diego Perez-Liebana

Short papers

• Object-Oriented State Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning for Video Games, Yu Chen, Huizhuo Yuan and Yujun Li
• Macro and Micro Reinforcement Learning for Playing Nine-ball Pool, Yu Chen and Yujun Li
• A Self-Play Policy Optimization Approach to Battling, Dan Huang and Scott Lee
• Win or Learn Fast Proximal Policy Optimisation, Dino Stephen Ratcliffe, Katja Hofmann and Sam Devlin
• An Empirical Evaluation of Two General Game Systems: Ludii and RBG, Eric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers and Cameron Browne
• Ludii and XCSP: Playing and Solving Logic Puzzles, Cédric Piette, Eric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers and Cameron Browne
• Learning Local Forward Models on Unforgiving Games, Alexander Dockhorn, Simon Lucas, Vanessa Volz, Ivan Bravi, Raluca Gaina and Diego Perez Liebana
• Creating an Affective Fighting Game AI System with Gamygdala, Kaori Yuda, Maxim Mozgovoy and Anna Danielewicz-Betz
• Deep Reinforcement Learning in Match-3 Game, Ildar Kamaldinov and Ilya Makarov
• A Hybrid Reinforcement Learning Approach for MARLÖ Challenge, Linjie Xu and Yihong Chen
• Modified PPO-RND Method for Solving Sparse Reward Problem in ViZDoom, Jia-Chi Chen and Tao-Hsing Chang
• Optimal Use of Experience in First Person Shooter Games, Matthew Aitchison
• Multi-Agent non-Overlapping Pathfinding with Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Mohammad Sina Kiarostami, Mohammad Reza Daneshvaramoli, Saleh Khalaj Monfared, Kamyar Givaki, Dara Rahmati and Saeid Gorgin

Vision papers

• Project Thyia: A Forever Gameplayer, Raluca Gaina, Simon Lucas and Diego Perez Liebana
• When Are We Done with Games?, Niels Justesen, Michael S. Debus and Sebastian Risi

Demo papers

• Pass in Human Style: Learning Soccer Game Patterns from Spatiotemporal Data, Victor Khaustov and Maxim Mozgovoy
• RDF* Graph Database as Interlingua for the TextWorld Challenge, Guntis Barzdins and Didzis Gosko
• Visualization of Deep Reinforcement Learning using Grad-CAM: How AI Plays Atari Games?, Ho-Taek Joo and Kyung-Joong Kim

Analytics and Player Modelling

Regular papers

• Your Gameplay Says it All: Modelling Motivation in Tom Clancy's The Division, David Melhart, Ahmad Azadvar, Alessandro Canossa, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis
• Combining Sequential and Aggregated Data for Churn Prediction inCasual Freemium Games, Jeppe Theiss Kristensen and Paolo Burelli
• Predicting the monetization percentage with survival analysis in free-to-play games, Riikka Numminen, Markus Viljanen and Tapio Pahikkala
• Scaling up CCG-Based Plan Recognition via Monte-Carlo Tree Search, Pavan Kantharaju, Santiago Ontañón and Christopher Geib
• Unconventional Exchange: Methods for Statistical Analysis of Virtual Goods, Oliver Scholten, James Walker, Kenneth Hawick and Peter Cowling
• Personality and Behavior in Role-based Online Games, Zhao Wang, Anna Sapienza, Aron Culotta and Emilio Ferrara
• An Experiment on Game Facet Combination, Raphael Patrick Prager, Laura Troost, Simeon Brüggenjürgen, David Melhart, Georgios N. Yannakakis and Mike Preuss
• Weekly Seasonal Player Population Patterns in Online Games: A Time Series Clustering Approach, Dulakshi Vihanga, Michael Barlow, Erandi Lakshika and Kathryn Kasmarik
• Identifying Cognitive Load in a Computer Game: An exploratory Study, Allan Fowler, Alessandro Canossa and Keith Nesbitt
• Mining Player In-game Time Spending Regularity for Churn Prediction in Free Online Games, Wanshan Yang, Ting Huang, Junlin Zeng, Gemeng Yang, Jintian Cai, Lijun Chen, Shivakant Mishra and Youjian Eugene Liu
• Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game, Guenter Wallner, Simone Kriglstein and Anders Drachen
• Modelling Early User-Game Interactions for Joint Estimation of Survival Time and Churn Probability, Valerio Bonometti, Charles Ringer, Alex Wade and Anders Drachen
• Using Active Probing by a Game Management AI to Faster Classify Players, Arkady Eidelberg, Christian Jacob and Jorg Denzinger

Short papers

• Characteristics Study of Dance-charts on Rhythm-based Video Games, Yudai Tsujino, Ryosuke Yamanishi and Yoichi Yamashita
• Profiling Players with Engagement Predictions, Ana Fernández del Río, Pei Pei Chen and África Periáñez
• PsyRTS: a Web Platform for Experiments in Human Decision-Making in RTS Environments, Omar Verduga and Magda Osman
• Can You Hear the Player Experience? A Pipeline for Automated Sentiment Analysis of Player Speech, Philipp Sykownik, Felix Born and Maic Masuch
• Inferring and Comparing Game Difficulty Curves using Player-vs-Level Match Data, Anurag Sarkar and Seth Cooper

Vision papers

• Experience Management in Multi-player Games, Jichen Zhu and Santiago Ontañón

Benchmarks and Competitions

Regular papers

• Rinascimento: Optimising Statistical Forward Planning Agents for Playing Splendor, Ivan Bravi, Simon Lucas, Diego Perez and Jialin Liu
• Two Human-Like Imitation-Learning Bots with Probabilistic Behaviors, Chris Pelling and Henry Gardner
• ToriLLE: Learning Environment for Hand-to-Hand Combat, Anssi Kanervisto and Ville Hautamäki

Competition papers

• B2CI 2019: The IEEE Brain to Computer Interface Competition’s Gaming Event, Joseph M. McQuighan, Garima Bajwa and Jason Pittman
• Video Game Description Language Environment for Unity Machine Learning Agents, Mads Johansen, Martin Pichlmair and Sebastian Risi
• Diverse Agents for Ad-Hoc Cooperation in Hanabi, Rodrigo de Moura Canaan, Julian Togelius, Andy Nealen and Stefan Menzel

Short papers

• MazeNavigator: A Customisable 3D Benchmark for Assessing Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning, Luke Harries, Sebastian Lee, Sam Devlin, Jaroslaw Rzepecki and Katja Hofmann
• Did You Hear That? Learning to Play Video Games from Audio Cues, Raluca Gaina and Matthew Stephenson

Vision papers

• Ludii as a Competition Platform, Matthew Stephenson, Eric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers and Cameron Browne

Game Design

Regular papers

• The Newborn World: Guiding Creativity in a Competitive Storytelling Game, Antonios Liapis
• Understanding the Effects of Gamification and Juiciness on Players, Kieran Hicks, Kathrin Maria Gerling, Graham Richardson, Tom Pike, Oliver Burman and Patrick Dickinson
• Not So Different Games: An exploration of five years of student game designers, Zoe Wood and Enrica Costello
• An Analysis of Peer Presence Social Group Dynamics to Enhance Player Engagement in Multiplayer Games, Mitchell Miller, Noah Paige, Guraik Claire and Christian Eckhardt
• Mek: Mechanics Prototyping Tool for 2D Tile-Based Turn-Based Deterministic Games, Rokas Volkovas, Michael Fairbank, John Woodward and Simon Lucas
• Level Design Patterns in 2D Games, Ahmed Khalifa, Fernando de Mesentier Silva and Julian Togelius

Short papers

• The Design Of A Clicker Game for Text Labelling, Chris Madge, Richard Bartle, Jon Chamberlain, Udo Kruschwitz and Massimo Poesio
• Relax, It’s a Game: Utilising Gamification in Learning Agile Scrum Development using Trello, Nitin Naik and Paul Jenkins
• Towards Cheap Scalable Browser Multiplayer, Yousef Amar, Gareth Tyson, Gianni Antichi and Lucio Marcenaro
• The Games Fusion Project: Competencies for Game Design, Karen Shoop, Chris Lowthorpe, Larra Anderson and Simon Lucas

Vision papers

• Towards Liveness in Game Development, Andrew Martin and Simon Colton

Demo papers

• An Overview of the Ludii General Game System, Matthew Stephenson, Eric Piette, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers and Cameron Browne

Game Interfaces and User Interaction

Regular papers

• Effects of advertisements and questionnaire interruptions on the player experience, Carlos Pereira Santos, Niels van Gaans, Vassilis-Javed Khan and Panos Markopoulos
• Comparing Co-Located and Remote Gameplay to Explore the Role of Physical Co-Presence in Multiplayer Room-Scale VR, Felix Born, Philipp Sykownik and Maic Masuch

Short papers

• Turning the classroom into an escape room with decoder hardware to increase student engagement, Robert Ross and Carolyn Bell

Game Theory and Multi-agent Systems

Regular papers

• Monte Carlo Strategies for Exploiting Fairness in N-player Ultimatum Games, Garrison Greenwood and Daniel Ashlock
• A Generalized Framework for Self-Play Training, Daniel Hernandez, Kevin Denamganai, Yuan Gao, Peter York, Sam Devlin, Spyridon Samothrakis and James Walker
• Learning to Select Mates in Evolving Non-playable Characters, Dylan Ashley, Valliappa Chockalingam, Braedy Kuzma and Vadim Bulitko
• Evolution of Kiting Behavior in a Two Player Combat Problem, Pavlos Androulakakis and Zachariah Fuchs
• Using Simple Games to Evaluate Self-Organization Concepts: a Whack-a-mole Case Study, Nick Nygren and Joerg Denzinger
• Prisoner's Dilemma Agents with Phenotypic Plasticity, Daniel Ashlock, Amanda Saunders and Eunyoun Kim
• Parallel Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation, Andrzej Nagórko

Short papers

• Logic foundations of manipulation as game mechanics, Javier Torres

Graphics and Animation

Short papers

• ToonToy: a node-based NPR solution for UnrealEngine4, Emanuele Salvucci

Narrative and Interactive Entertainment

Regular papers

• Timing Interactive Narratives, Thomas Cabioch, Ronan Champagnat, Anne-Gwenn Bosser, Jean-Noël Chiganne and Martin Dieguez

Short papers

• Influencing the Behavioral Responses of Players in an Interactive Narrative Game through Music and Arousal Congruency, Logan Parmeter and Matthew Fendt

PCG and AI for Game Design

Regular papers

• Mysterious Murder - MCTS-driven Murder Mystery Generation, Corinna Jaschek, Tom Beckmann, Jaime Garcia and William Raffe
• Level Graph – Incremental Procedural Generation of Indoor Levels using Minimum Spanning Trees, Bartosz von Rymon Lipinski, Simon Seibt, Johannes Roth and Dominik Abé
• Automatic Generation of Level Maps with the Do What's Possible Representation, Daniel Ashlock and Christoph Salge
• Hyperstate Space Graphs For Automated Game Analysis, Michael Cook and Azalea Raad
• General Analytical Techniques For Parameter-Based Procedural Content Generators, Michael Cook, Simon Colton, Jeremy Gow and Gillian Smith
• Fusing Level and Ruleset Features for Multimodal Learning of Gameplay Outcomes, Antonios Liapis, Daniel Karavolos, Konstantinos Makantasis, Konstantinos Sfikas and Georgios N. Yannakakis
• Empowering Quality Diversity in Dungeon Design with Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites, Alberto Alvarez, Steve Dahlskog, Jose Font and Julian Togelius
• Reveal-More: Amplifying Human Effort in Quality Assurance Testing Using Automated Exploration, Kenneth Chang, Batu Aytemiz and Adam M. Smith
• Learning a Resource Scale for Collectible Card Games, Gianlucca Zuin and Adriano Veloso
• On the Effects of Simulating Human Decisions in Game Analysis, Vanessa Volz and Boris Naujoks
• Evolving the Hearthstone Meta, Fernando De Mesentier Silva, Rodrigo Canaan, Scott Lee, Julian Togelius and Amy K. Hoover
• Taksim: A Constrained Graph Partitioning Framework for Procedural Content Generation, Ahmed Abuzuraiq, Arron Ferguson and Philippe Pasquier
• Automatic Generation of Diverse Cavern Maps with Morphing Cellular Automata, Matthew Kreitzer, Daniel Ashlock and Rajesh Pereira
• Pitako - Recommending Game Design Elements in Cicero, Tiago Machado, Dan Gopstein, Andy Nealen and Julian Togelius
• Procedural Progression Model for Smash Time, João Catarino and Carlos Martinho
• Procedural Generation using Spatial GANs for Region-Specific Learning of Elevation Data, Ryan Spick, Peter Cowling and James Alfred Walker
• Heuristics for Placing the Spawn Points in Multiplayer First Person Shooters, Marco Ballabio and Daniele Loiacono
• Generating Stages in Turn-Based RPG using Reinforcement Learning, Nam Sang Gyu and Kokolo Ikeda
• Searching the Latent Space of a Generative Adversarial Network to Generate DOOM Levels, Edoardo Giacomello, Pier Luca Lanzi and Daniele Loiacono
• Monster Carlo 2: Integrating Learning and TreeSearch for Machine Playtesting, Oleksandra Keehl and Adam M. Smith

Competition papers

• Optimising Level Generators for General Video Game AI, Olve Drageset, Raluca Gaina, Diego Perez Liebana and Mark Winands
• Angry Birds Level Generator with Rube Goldberg Machine Mechanism, Febri Abdullah, Pujana Paliyawan, Ruck Thawonmas, Tomohiro Harada and Fitra Bachtiar

Short papers

• Automatic Generation of Game Content using a Non-Grid Wave Function Collapse Algorithm, Hwanhee Kim, Seongtaek Lee, Hyundong Lee, Teasung Hahn and Shinjin Kang
• PlayMapper: Illuminating Design Spaces of Platform Games, Vivek Warriar, Carmen Ugarte, John Woodward and Laurissa Tokarchuk
• A Functional Taxonomy of Logic Puzzles, Lianne Hufkens and Cameron Browne
• Autoencoder and Evolutionary Algorithm for Level Generation in Lode Runner, Sarjak Pankaj Thakkar, Changxing Cao, Lifan Wang, Taejong Choi and Juilian Togelius
• Deep Variational Autoencoders for NPC Behaviour Classification, Everton Schumacker Soares and Vadim Bulitko
• ELIMINATION from Design to Analysis, Ahmed Khalifa, Daniel Gopstein and Julian Togelius
• Towards Procedurally Generated Languages for Non-playable Characters in Video Games, Joshua Sirota, Vadim Bulitko, Matthew Brown and Sergio Poo

Vision papers

• Procedural Content Generation through Quality Diversity, Daniele Gravina, Ahmed Khalifa, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius and Georgios N. Yannakakis
• The Riddle of Togelby, Daniel Ashlock and Christoph Salge

Demo papers

• Remixing headlines for context-appropriate flavor text, Judith van Stegeren and Mariët Theune
• Interactive Machine Learning for More Expressive Game Interactions, Carlos Gonzalez Diaz, Phoenix Perry and Rebecca Fiebrink

Serious Games Technology

Regular papers

• Group Interactions Manager for Multiplayer sErious games, Samuel Gomes, Joao Dias and Carlos Martinho
• Portability of Serious Game Software Components, Wim van der Vegt, Wim Westera and Hub Kurvers
• Exploring motor behaviours in bimanual interactive games, Nuria Pena Perez, Laurissa Tokarchuk, Etienne Burdet and Ildar Farkhatdinov
• Serious Games’Eco-driving Profiling, Rana Massoud, Francesco Bellotti, Stefan Poslad, Riccardo Berta and Alessandro De Gloria
• An Approach Towards Designing Problem Networks in Serious Games, Abhishek Parakh, Parvathi Chundi and Mahadevan Subramaniam
• Generating Educational Game Levels with Multistep Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network, Kyungjin Park, Bradford W. Mott, Wookhee Min, Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Eric N. Wiebe and James C. Lester
• Learning Analytics Should Analyse the Learning: Proposing a Generic Stealth Assessment Tool, Konstantinos Georgiadis, Giel van Lankveld, Kiavash Bahreini and Wim Westera
• Motion Gaming AI using Time Series Forecasting and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment for Improving Exercise Balance and Enjoyment, Takahiro Kusano, Yunshi Liu, Pujana Paliyawan, Ruck Thawonmas and Tomohiro Harada
• Blockchain Games: A Survey, Tian Min, Hanyi Wang, Yaoze Guo and Wei Cai

Short papers

• Using Learning Games to Teach Texas Civil War History to Public Middle School Students, Matthew Fendt and Eric Ames
• A novel music-based game with motion capture to support cognitive and motor function in the elderly, Kat Agres, Simon Lui and Dorien Herremans
• The Sustainability Game: AI Technology as an Intervention for Public Understanding of Cooperative Investment, Andreas Theodorou, Bryn Brandt-Law and Joanna J. Bryson
• Realtime Adaptive Virtual Reality for Pain Reduction, Alexiei Dingli and Luca Bondin

Demo papers

• neomento - towards building a universal solution for virtual reality exposure psychotherapy, Adam Streck, Philipp Stepnicka, Jens Klaubert and Thomas Wolbers

Sound and Music

Regular papers

• G-SpAR: GPU-Based Voxel Graph Pathfinding for Spatial Audio Rendering in Games and VR, Mirza Beig, Bill Kapralos, Karen Collins and Pejman Mirza-Babaei
• Music Matters: An empirical study on the effects of adaptive music on experienced and perceived player affect, Cale Plut and Philippe Pasquier

Special Session 1: Matchmaking in Games

Regular papers

• Resolving Simultaneity Bias: Using Features to Estimate Probability of Winning in Competitive Games, Anders Harboell Christiansen, Emil Gensby and Bryan S. Weber

Special Session 2: Esports Research: Challenges, Advances and Opportunities

Regular papers

• Time to Die: Death Prediction in Dota 2 using Deep Learning, Adam Katona, Ryan Spick, Victoria Hodge, Simon Demediuk, Florian Block, Anders Drachen and James Alfred Walker
• Multi-View Joint Emotion and Game Context Recognition in League of Legends Live Stream, Charles Ringer, Mihalis Nicolaou and James Walker

Short papers

• Towards Multi-modal Stress Response Modelling in Competitive League of Legends, Paris Mavromoustakos-Blom, Sander Bakkes and Pieter Spronck
• Enhancing Battle Maps through Flow Graphs, Guenter Wallner

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Regular papers

• The Illusion of Animal Body Ownership and Its Potential for Virtual Reality Games, Andrey Krekhov, Sebastian Cmentowski and Jens Krüger
• Modelling Player Preferences in AR Mobile Games, Vivek Warriar, John Woodward and Laurissa Tokarchuk
• Rest Pose Considered Harmful in Virtual Reality, Julien Marengo, Phil Lopes and Ronan Boulic